RESEARCH SUMMARY for the TYPEFINDER Personality Assessment Molly Owens, MA, and Andrew D. Carson, PhD. Truity Psychometrics LLC
OVERVIEW The TypeFinder 1 personality type assessment is an indicator of personality with applications in personal exploration, counseling, coaching, employee development, and research. It is administered online (http://www.truity.com). The TypeFinder provides a comprehensive assessment of basic types of personality according to the system developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. This report is intended to provide a brief summary of research completed thus far on the TypeFinder. USE The TypeFinder assessment is directly available for use through the world-wide web. Thus anyone with access to the Internet and a modern web browser may access the assessments through Truity.com (specifically, http://www.truity.com). ADMINISTRATION Examinees must access the Truity.com site to complete the TypeFinder assessment. Registration and payment are not required to complete the questionnaire; however, to view the complete results of the assessment, users must purchase a report ($29). Online assessment. Administration of the TypeFinder leads the examinee through a series of pages with a number of questions on each screen. Users may return to prior pages or move forward, and any responses are preserved. However, once the user completes the entire assessment and reaches the report page, it will not allow returning to the pages with test items. The test is adaptive in two ways. First, Section 1 has a fixed set of questions (44), but Sections 2-4 vary in their number of questions. From the examinee s perspective, administration of the assessment is seamless and involves no choice for how many questions 1 TypeFinder is a registered service mark of Truity Psychometrics, LLC. Page 2 of 5
to respond to in each section. The rules for determining how many items to administer occurs automatically and in the background. Second, tiebreaker items can be administered in order to allow differentiation on a personality style dimension (e.g., E/I); in practice, examinees rarely receive more than one or two such items in an administration. Administration typically requires less than 30 minutes. Pro Account Service. The Truity.com site offers a Pro Account service through which professionals or institutions may arrange for multiple clients to complete assessments from the site, including the TypeFinder assessments. Administrations accessed through the Pro Account Service do not change the nature of the test form administered. INTERPRETATION Interpretive reports are generated automatically by the scoring and reporting system. They are available immediately after the examinee completes the set of test questions for the particular form. In the case of the Pro Account service, the report is also available to the Pro Account holder who arranged for the assessment. RELIABILITY Internal consistency reliability was calculated for the initial, universal set of 44 items using a sample of N=5027. Table 1 shows Cronbach s alpha for each of the four scales. Table 1: Cronbach s alpha Scale Items Alpha E/I 11.891 S/N 11.814 T/F 11.845 J/P 11.891 Page 3 of 5
VALIDITY Several studies related to the validity of the TypeFinder have been conducted. Below, we detail the studies most relevant to its validity as a measure of psychological type. STUDY I: RELATION TO PRIOR TYPE ASSESSMENT Initial data supporting the construct validity of a new test may sometimes be supplied by examinees through brief self-report. The sample for this study included 3,486 examinees who reported that they were very confident that they were already aware of their type from prior exploration and experience. The personality styles (IE, SN, TF, and JP) for the TypeFinder were compared with the selfreported prior assessment of type. This yielded a possible degree of match between 0 and 4 dimensions. As shown in Table 2, the results suggest that the TypeFinder achieved good consistency with self-reported type, yielding match on all four dimensions 69% of the time, and match on at least 3 of the dimensions 92% of the time. Table 2: Whole Type Match Dimensions Matched N Percent CumulaOve Percent 4 2,406 69 69 3 815 23.4 92.4 2 209 6 98.4 1 44 1.3 99.7 0 12 0.03 99.73 Table 3 presents the sample results broken out for each personality style dimension; each of the styles matched at least 88% of the time, and the match for EI was 94%. This represents an extremely high degree of consistency, especially considering the likely poor reliability of the criterion measure (i.e., the examinee trying to remember what their type would have been based on either a prior assessment through some other measure, or trying to remember what their type appeared to be based on reading a book or some other less formal means). Page 4 of 5
Table 3: Match between TypeFinder and Prior Type Acquired through Self- Report Personality Style Dimension Match? N Percent EI No 209 6 Yes 3,277 94 SN No 404 11.6 Yes 3,082 88.4 TF No 366 10.5 Yes 3,120 89.5 JP No 434 12.4 Yes 3,052 87.6 STUDY 2: RESPONDENT PERCEPTIONS OF TYPEFINDER RESULTS The sample for this study included 857 examinees who provided requested data on their perception of the degree of accuracy and usefulness of the TypeFinder results. When asked How accurate did you find your results? over 85% of examinees rated the results as either Extremely Accurate or Very Accurate. When asked, Did your report give you useful information? over 96% of examinees said that the report was useful. These findings suggest that those who complete the TypeFinder assessment typically see it as both accurate and useful. Page 5 of 5